Editor's notes (Winter 07/08)
The latest graduate destinations figures, presented in the article ‘What Do Graduates Do? 2008’, show that UK graduates continue to enjoy low unemployment and positive job prospects. The data for the 2006 graduating cohort six months after graduating showed a slight decrease in unemployment compared with the 2005 cohort. With the recent turmoil in the financial markets and talk of a possible recession to come, it would be very interesting to see how those graduating more recently will fare in the job market this coming year, and what effect the economic slowdown has on graduate recruitment.
Regardless of the state of the economy, recruiters will always be faced with the task of deciding how best to go about selecting the most suitable candidate for their post. According to Graduate Careers Australia’s 2007 Graduate Outlook Survey, as reported in the Summer 07 issue of Graduate Grapevine, interpersonal and communication skills are rated as the most important selection criteria for recruiting graduates, followed by critical reasoning and analytical skills/problem solving/lateral thinking/technical skills, and the least desirable characteristics are a poor attitude and lack of work ethic. Students and graduates, therefore, would need to demonstrate their personal and other soft skills to employers, and cannot rely solely on their academic achievements. Furthermore, with increasing numbers of students obtaining a ‘good’ degree, a 2.1 honours degree no longer holds the same currency as a decade ago. Latest figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency show that 13% of those graduating in 2007 obtained a first class honours award, an increase of one percentage point from 2005/06, and 48% obtained an upper second class honours award, an increase of one percentage point from 2005/06. In this issue of GMT, Professor Mantz Yorke, author of Grading Student Achievement in Higher Education, expresses his views about how the current assessment system could be modified to suit employers’ needs. See the article Recognising the breadth of contemporary graduate achievement.
I hope you will enjoy reading this latest issue of GMT.
Pearl Mok (Editor)
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